Lady Gregory quotes

Lady Gregory was an Irish dramatist, folklorist, and theatre manager, best known as a co-founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Her plays and collections of Irish myths greatly influenced the Irish Literary Revival. She played a crucial role in promoting Irish culture and supporting other writers like W.B. Yeats. Here are 39 of her quotes:

It was among farmers and potato diggers and old men in workhouses and beggars at my own door that I found what was beyond these and yet farther beyond that drawingroom poet of my childhood in the expression of love, and grief, and the pain of parting, that are the disclosure of the individual soul. (Lady Gregory)
Every day in the year there comes some malice into the world, and where it comes from is no good place. View quote
Lady Gregory
It is the old battle, between those who use a toothbrush and those who don't. View quote
Lady Gregory
My husband was in the war of the Crimea. It is terrible the hardships he went through‚ to be two months without going into a house‚ under the snow in trenches. And no food to get‚ maybe a biscuit in the day. And there was enough food there‚ he said‚ to feed all Ireland; but bad management‚ they could not get it. View quote
Lady Gregory
It takes madness to find out madness. View quote
Lady Gregory
The way most people fail is in not keeping up the heart. View quote
Lady Gregory
We would not give up our own country - Ireland - if we were to get the whole world as an estate, and the Country of the Young along with it. View quote
Lady Gregory
There is many a man without learning will get the better of a college-bred man, and will have better words, too. View quote
Lady Gregory
Every trick is an old one, but with a change of players, a change of dress, it comes out as new as before. View quote
Lady Gregory
I said, in talking, that I felt more and more the time wasted that was not spent in Ireland. View quote
Lady Gregory
The time the moon is going back, the blood that is in a person does be weakening, but when the moon is strong, the blood that moves strong in the same way. And it to be at the full, it drags the wits along with it, the same as it drags the tide. (Lady Gregory)
I don't know in the world why anyone would consent to be a king, and never to be left to himself, but to be worried and wearied and interfered with from dark to daybreak and from morning to the fall of night. View quote
Lady Gregory
It is not always them that has the most that makes the most show. View quote
Lady Gregory
In the whole course of our work at the theatre we have been, I may say, drenched with advice by friendly people who for years gave us the reasons why we did not succeed... All their advice, or at least some of it, might have been good if we had wanted to make money, to make a common place of amusement. View quote
Lady Gregory
As to the old history of Ireland, the first man ever died in Ireland was Partholan, and he is buried, and his greyhound along with him, at some place in Kerry. View quote
Lady Gregory
There is lasting kindness in Heaven when no kindness is found upon earth. View quote
Lady Gregory
It was at Inver Slane, to the north of Leinster, the sons of Gaedhal of the Shining Armour, the Very Gentle, that were called afterwards the Sons of the Gael, made their first attempt to land in Ireland to avenge Ith, one of their race that had come there one time and had met with his death. View quote
Lady Gregory
Irish history having been forbidden in schools, has been, to a great extent, learned from Raftery's poems by the people of Mayo, where he was born, and of Galway, where he spent his later years. View quote
Lady Gregory
I'll take no charity! What I get I'll earn by taking it. I would feel no pleasure it being given to me, any more than a huntsman would take pleasure being made a present of a dead fox, in place of getting a run across country after it. View quote
Lady Gregory
To you, W. B. Yeats, good praiser, wholesome dispraiser, heavy-handed judge, open-handed helper of us all, I offer a play of my plays for every night of the week, because you like them, and because you have taught me my trade. View quote
Lady Gregory
Well, there's no one at all, they do be saying, but is deserving of some punishment from the very minute of his birth. (Lady Gregory)
Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland his poetry is, and he would have done other things but that he died young. View quote
Lady Gregory
Queen Victoria was loyal and true to the Pope; that is what I was told, and so is Edward the Seventh loyal and true, but he has got something contrary in his body. View quote
Lady Gregory
It was on the first day of Beltaine, that is called now May Day, the Tuatha de Danaan came, and it was to the north-west of Connacht they landed. But the Firbolgs, the Men of the Bag, that were in Ireland before them, and that had come from the South, saw nothing but a mist, and it lying on the hills. View quote
Lady Gregory
It's best make changes little by little, the same as you'd put clothes upon a growing child. View quote
Lady Gregory